


Lessons

by EssayOfThoughts



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Backstory, Gen, character piece
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-01
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-05-04 08:46:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5327948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha has learned several lessons in her life, and none of them were <i>nice</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lessons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TobermorianSass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TobermorianSass/gifts).



The first thing Natasha learns is silence. She is Natalia then, and knows just how hard the ‘t’ of her name sounds when called out across the snow. She learns to muffle her footsteps and to slip away and back without notice.

 

* * *

 

The second thing Natasha learns is pain. The cold is one kind, a numbing, and then a burning when it thaws, but bruises, breaks, cuts and cracks all bring their own flavour. Natasha learns the taste of the blood as deep a red as her hair.

 

* * *

 

The third thing Natasha learns is lies. Lies to tell, lies to listen, lies to detect and lies to disseminate. She learns to lie about herself, about her education, about her past. She learns this all so young she isn’t sure of what is really true anymore.

 

* * *

 

The fourth thing Natasha learns is freedom, and how she may never have it. Her training has trapped her into a cycle, always detecting lies, never able to trust, never able to be a normal person. Sometimes she doesn’t care, but other times… other times it hurts, hurts like frostbite, like a broken femur, like a dislocated shoulder, hurts like grazed knuckles and a loose tooth.

She graduates with her four lessons – how to be silent and how to use it, how to deal pain and how to take it, how to tell lies and detect them, how to accept imprisonment and never long for freedom – and does not question them. This was what she was trained for, conditioned for. This is why they injected her with vaccine after vaccine, serum after serum, why they had her break her bones and heal them, had her stitch her own wounds up, had her fight her own infections, had her kill those she had once hoped could be sisters.

Natasha looks at the other girls (red hair, brown hair, blue eyes and green, all lined up in the dorm, waiting for assignments that would go on to kill half of them) and knows. She has to be better than them. She has to be the best, for if she is not she will die, eventually. She will suffer, eventually. Natasha does her jobs. Lives her life, and another’s life and another’s life, lies after lies after lies.

She forgets, sometimes, what it is to be truthful.

 

* * *

 

She is free, sort of, when she realises somone is after her. Freed from those who trained her, though they track her still. Freed from their expectations, freed to work as she chooses, free from the stress of wondering what her next job will be.

She has one job now: survive.

 

* * *

 

She cannot restrain the laugh she gives when she realises the man they sent after her is an _archer_. An old art, an art that – to the extent this man has learned it – might as well be lost to most. He is _brilliant_ and it gives her something to test herself against as she flees.

 

* * *

 

The man won’t shoot on a crowd, she’s noticed, so she keeps moving. Finds trains and squares, bustling malls and packed airports. Anywhere there are people she goes, uses them to travel, to duck and weave around the archer’s sights. The archer never fires, but she swears she can feel his eyes on her, as focussed and fierce as a hawks’, watching.

 

* * *

 

He catches up to her in Budapest.

She hadn’t meant to be caught alone down the alley, and she’d heard him, soft-footed, going from roof to roof to follow her down ever narrower paths.

And then the path is empty, and an arrow, sparking with electricity, strikes her in the back.

It is the first time in a long time that she has been bested, and she blacks out.

 

* * *

 

She wakes cuffed to a bed. It almost reminds her of her girlhood – it could barely be called ‘childhood’ – and it takes her only a moment to find the tiny piece of metal she keeps by her gum and pick the lock. The archer is in the room outside, cloth quiet and soft, running over the dark carbon fibre of his bow. He respects his weapon, she notes, and respects him for that. Beside him on the table, and strapped to his thigh are quivers of arrows, each with slightly different coloured notches. She imagines that’s how he tells them apart, bladed from the taser-arrow he used, from whatever else he might have. She wracks her brains, and tries to think who this one could be.

The man glances up at her, nods and gestures towards the sink.

“Have some water,” he says. “You’ll have one hell of a headache, I imagine.”

Natasha moves slowly, smells and tastes the water, then drinks. She wants _out_ , but knows the man is fast enough with his bow to stop her, especially with it already in his hands. She scans him, tries to get a read on him, tries to find a marking emblem anywhere that might tell her who she is, who he works for, who is after her.

She finally finds the eagle shield, darkly embossed against dark Kevlar. _S.H.I.E.L.D._

The man glances up at her again. “Figured it out?”

Natasha only nods.

“We-,” he pauses, like he’s not entirely certain if he has the right. “ _I’d_ like to offer you a job.”

 

* * *

 


End file.
